Runner tops Plot's new arrivals this week. The action thriller opened in theaters in September and comes home this Tuesday, turning a medical delivery into a cross-country chase: Alan Ritchson plays a former soldier who ends up escorting a black-market organ meant to save a dying girl, with Owen Wilson as the courier whose mouth moves faster than his feet.
The film is the work of Scott Waugh, a former stunt coordinator who went on to direct Act of Valor and Need for Speed, and that background shows. The plot is thin, but the chases, crashes and hand-to-hand sequences carry real weight and geography, the kind of choreography that comes from someone who has rigged the stunts himself rather than simply called for them.
Hope, also arriving home this week, is the more ambitious swing. Na Hong-jin's first film since 2016's The Wailing premiered at Cannes to a six-minute standing ovation and a genuinely split room, the kind of reaction that tends to follow a film nobody can quite categorize. It casts Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander not as the human leads but as the unknown presence terrorizing a remote village near the North Korean border. Hope holds a 78% on Rotten Tomatoes, a strong number for a film this strange.
The rest of the week rounds out comfortably. VisionQuest finally gives Paul Bettany's Vision a show of his own, picking up the character nearly five years after WandaVision and premiering its first episodes this Wednesday. Practical Magic 2 comes home the same day as Runner and Hope, bringing Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman back as the Owens sisters three decades on from the original.
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Street Fighter resets the video game franchise with a sprawling new ensemble built for a long tournament arc, opening in theaters Friday. The same day brings La Bola Negra, the Spanish drama that won its directors the Best Director prize at Cannes this year for tracing three generations of men across a century of Spanish history. Of the six, Hope is the one worth clearing an evening for: Na Hong-jin's film is the swing big enough to have people arguing by the weekend, while the rest make for easy, comfortable additions to a watchlist.
